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A recipient group is a list of people who should hear about a particular kind of incident, plus the conditions that decide which incidents qualify. Groups are what make communications targeted: a responder chooses the message, and the groups decide the audience. Getting groups right is the substantive work in setting up Communications. Templates are easy once you know who is listening.

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What a Group Holds

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What this audience is, in the terms your organization uses. “Enterprise customer success” beats “Group 2” when someone is checking who a message reached.
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type
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Every group belongs to one type. This is what connects an audience to the messages it can receive — a group under “Customer updates” only ever receives customer-update communications.
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up to 50
Rootly users and external people. External members are the point of the feature: customers, executives, and support leads generally do not have Rootly accounts. A group holds up to 50 participants.
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email, SMS, or Slack
How this group is reached. Match the channel to the audience rather than the message — executives may want SMS for severity 0 and email for everything else, which is two groups, not one.
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private or public
A private group is managed by admins: membership is deliberate. A public group can be subscribed to, so stakeholders opt themselves in. Public groups suit broad internal audiences; private groups suit anything external or sensitive.
The 50-participant limit is per group, not per communication. A message reaching several matching groups reaches all of their members. Split large audiences by what they care about — which usually produces better-targeted conditions anyway.

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Conditions

Conditions decide which incidents reach a group. Without them, a group would hear about everything. A condition matches an incident property against values you choose:

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All or Any

A group matches on all of its conditions or any of them, and the difference is large:
  • All — every condition must match. Severity is SEV0 and Service is Payments reaches this group only for severity-0 payments incidents. Narrow and predictable.
  • Any — one match is enough. The same two conditions now reach the group for every SEV0 anywhere, and every payments incident at any severity. Much broader than it looks when writing it.
Setting a group to any with several conditions is the most common way stakeholders end up over-notified. Start with all, confirm the group is being reached when it should be, and widen only if it is missing incidents it should hear about.

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Public Groups and Self-Subscription

A public group can be subscribed to rather than administered. This works well when the audience is large, internal, and self-selecting — the people who want to know about payments incidents usually know who they are. Keep external and sensitive audiences private. Anything a customer receives should have deliberate membership.
Public groups reduce the maintenance burden that kills communication setups. A private group nobody updates after a reorganization quietly sends to the wrong people; a public one lets its members fix that themselves.

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Designing a Group Structure

Groups multiply quickly. A structure that stays manageable usually follows the audience, not the org chart:
  1. Start from the question “who needs to know?” for two or three realistic incidents. That produces your first groups.
  2. Separate by channel only when the channel genuinely differs. An audience that wants SMS for severity 0 and email otherwise is two groups with different conditions.
  3. Prefer functionality over service for customer-facing groups. Customers recognize “Checkout” more readily than the services behind it.
  4. Keep executive groups narrow. A severity condition alone is usually right; adding services tends to produce gaps.
  5. Review after reorganizations. Conditions referencing services or teams drift when ownership moves.

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Troubleshooting

Check the incident against the group’s conditions rather than the message. The usual causes: the incident’s severity is below the threshold, the affected service or functionality is not attached to the incident, or the group’s conditions are set to all and only some matched.
Conditions are probably set to any. Switch to all and add the narrowing condition that was missing, most often severity.
A group holds up to 50 participants. Split it along the lines its conditions already suggest — by service or functionality — rather than raising the count.
Groups belong to a communication type, and a type in use cannot be removed while groups or templates depend on it. Detach or remove those first.
The group is private. Only public groups accept self-subscription.

Templates and Stages

The messages these groups receive.

Sending a Communication

How groups are resolved when an update goes out.